David Stairs
In 1961 Hannah Arendt was hired by the New Yorker to travel to Jerusalem and report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann had been apprehended by the Israeli intelligence service the previous year in Argentina and abducted to Israel to stand trial for war crimes.
The man in the glass booth. Jerusalem, 1961
In Jerusalem the 55 year-old Eichmann, slight and balding, appeared in a bullet-proof glass booth during the trial. In the Third Reich the former oil salesman had attained the rank of SS Lieutenant Colonel under Reynhard Heidrich, the Butcher of Prague. A participant at the infamous 1942 Wannsee Conference that planned the Final Solution, Eichmann prepared the official record of the conference. He had been involved with efforts to deport and relocate Jews up to that point, and had a working relationship with some Jewish leaders. Consequently, he became responsible for arranging the deportation by rail of victims to extermination camps, like Auschwitz. This led directly to the annihilation of hundreds of thousands of Jews, particularly 437,000 of Hungary’s 725,000 Jews, deported in 1944.
In a trial that lasted four months, Eichmann was accused of crimes against humanity, and crimes against the Jewish people. In his defense, Eichmann evinced no animosity toward Jews, claiming he was only acting on orders from Hitler, and never participated directly in any harm to specific Jews. Arendt, who herself had been displaced by the Nazis, was surprised at Eichmann’s ordinariness. Where the prosecution tried to paint him as a monster, Arendt saw only a mediocre functionary given to clichés, leading to her famous comments about the “banality of evil.” Consequently, she was blamed for apologizing for Eichmann, an accusation she fought against for the rest of her life. In December 1961 Eichmann was found guilty. His appeal was quickly dismissed and, before any further appeals could be made, he was hanged by the Israelis.
Benjamin Netanyahu was thirteen years old when Adolf Eichmann was executed. Netanyahu was born in Israel but grew up in the United States, returning to Israel in 1967 to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces. After being honorably discharged he attended MIT and, following his graduation, worked in Boston for a time before returning permanently to Israel in 1978. In 1996 he became the youngest elected prime minister in Israel’s history, serving from 1996-1999, and again from 2009-2021.
The State of Israel is a settler nation. From the 1870s to the 1930s Jewish people from Europe emigrated to Palestine as part of the Zionist movement to found a permanent Jewish state. Initially part of the declining Ottoman Empire, after the First World War Palestine became a trust territory of Britain, administered until 1948. As early as 1920 Chaim Weizmann, later the first President of Israel, was pressuring the British to acknowledge Israel as the permanent Jewish homeland. During this time, Jews, including many from Germany, continued to relocate to Palestine, purchasing land and, ultimately, clashing with Arab residents who have always considered the Jews as outsiders and “occupiers.” This is the point the Western media consistently overlooks in its reporting of the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023.
Although at first it would seem that there is little similarity between Adolf Eichmann and Benjamin Netanyahu, one of the things they had in common was a strong sense of nationalism. Eichmann participated in the Third Reich’s program to create “lebensraum” for the German people by confiscating land and wealth from Jews and Poles and extending the reach of the Reich in an easterly direction. Land appropriated was often reapportioned to German settlers. Netanyahu has been similarly involved in a Zionist settler movement in Israel that has been instrumental in disenfranchising Palestinians while building Jewish settlements on former Palestinian land in violation of international law.
In both men the perceived enemy was “othered” nearly out of existence. A willingness to commit genocide existed in both men. Where Eichmann was a functionary following his Fuhrer’s orders, Netanyahu led the charge from the top. Both men were participants in an effort to create a living hell for their enemies along the way to their “total annihilation.” The deaths of tens of thousands of women and children was not an issue for either. The Israelis are now fond of saying that October 7th was their darkest day since the Holocaust. The 40:1 death toll ratio inflicted by Israel upon Gaza is more than just repayment for a dark day. It is a moral blot on the soul of the Jewish people.
Eichmann the war criminal realized his offenses and went into hiding for fifteen years following the Nazi defeat in 1945, changing his name, and finally, his country. Netanyahu, accused of war crimes by the ICC, continues to act with impunity as he processes and expands his genocidal mania into Lebanon, employing the Israeli war machine to apply scorched earth tactics in that beleaguered country.
UN 79th General Assembly, New York. September 27, 2024.
To this point a misdirected American foreign policy has supported Netanyahu, her adoptive son, but patience grows thin even in the craven Biden Administration. When he came to New York on September 27th, 2024 to plead his aggrieved case at the United Nations, several delegations walked out of his talk. While he did not speak from inside a bullet-proof glass booth, one can only think that Netanyahu’s day of judgement approaches ever nearer. It’s unlikely that Hannah Arendt, had she lived to hear his presentation, would have been accused of apologizing for him. Whether Benjamin Netanyahu is ever prosecuted for his crimes remains to be seen. At the very least, world opinion has not been deceived. No one is fooled by his false promises of peace. That the Butcher of Gaza will go down in history as Eichmann’s equivalent is now beyond doubt.
David Stairs is the founding editor of the Design-Altruism-Project.
